We are delighted to host the second of the new SAHGB/IHR/Wellcome Collections Partnership seminar series.
This session, the second in the SAHGB/IHR/Wellcome Collections-sponsored seminar series, “Spaces of Sickness and Health: Histories of Art, Architecture, and Experience”, explores the salutogenic, architectural, and social implications of healing spaces beyond hospitals--from shrines to schools--across a range of geographies and time periods.
In foregrounding the origins, context, and promotion of health and well-being, medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky’s (1979) concept of salutogenesis offers a useful lens to study health beyond sickness and disease. Applying this approach to the history and practice of architecture, how might we conceive of a similarly broad landscape, practice, and experience of health promotion?
Taking a multifaceted perspective of health and the places in which it is defined, practiced, and nurtured, the five contributions that comprise this session illuminate a range of place types that were--and continue to be--important spaces of health promotion:
“‘The Best Cure’: Shrines as Sites of Healing in Shiʿi Islam,” by Fuchsia Hart
“Florence Nightingale: Putting the Home at the Heart of Health,” by Anna Greenwood
“Nature, Architecture, and National Regeneration: Écoles de Plein Air in Interwar France,” by Gina Greene
“Standards, Measurements, and the Design of Moral Health at the YMCA,” by Paula Lupkin
“Taking care of our own: An outline for research into spaces for the self-provision of health care in outcast and oppressed communities,” by Helen Holland Bronston
Though emblematic of different practices and experiences of care and reflective of diverse definitions of health that necessitate, shape, and are shaped by these spaces, each foregrounds important medical, architectural, and/or social reverberations. Seen together, these examples demonstrate the ways in which such spaces might be recognized as more than simply places of care and comfort, but also as sources of resilience and inspiration and, in so doing, suggest the value of recognizing, supporting, and studying alternative spaces and practices of health promotion.
Panelist bios:
Anna Greenwood is Associate Professor in Health History at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has works on a number of topics related to the history of modern medicine, including the deployment of western medicine under British Imperialism, the history of Florence Nightingale, and the integrated histories of medicine, pharmacy and retail consumerism. She is the author of several books and academic articles and, from Autumn 2021, she will be leading a large four year Arts and Humanities Research Council project on the history British health and beauty in international perspective.
Fuchsia Hart is a PhD candidate at the Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East at the University of Oxford. She received an MPhil in Islamic Art from the University of Oxford in 2016. Her doctoral research focuses on the reign of Fath ʿAli Shah, ruler of Iran from 1797-1834, and his pilgrimages to and patronage of the major shrines of Iran and Iraq. More broadly, her work explores the material culture, uses, and significance of shrines within Shiʿi contexts.
Helen Holland Bronston is an architect with thirty years’ experience in the design of facilities for health care, scientific research, education, and communities. She is also a PhD candidate in History of Architecture at the University of California - Berkeley, researching the beginnings of capitalist commercial urban development through the built projects of the East India Company in London.
Paula Lupkin, associate professor at the University of North Texas, is a historian of design, architecture, and cities. Through fieldwork, archival research, teaching, writing, and digital humanities projects, she examines the ways that capital flows and technological innovations carve patterns in the land, shape the design of the material world, and provide a framework for human relations. Supported by the Graham Foundation, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, the Texas State Historical Society, and the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU, she has been the author of books and articles on diverse topics including YMCA architecture, American interior design practice, and the relationship between beer, cannabis, and the design of Louis Sullivan's famous skyscraper, the Wainwright Building. Recent work on historic interiors includes Shaping the American Interior: Contexts, Structures, and Practices (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Penny Sparke, and “The Telegraphic Interior: Networking Space for Capital Flows in the 1920s” in Interior Provocations (Routledge, forthcoming 2020).
Gina Greene received her Ph.D. in Architectural History from Princeton University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar. Her research examines the intersection between public health and the built environment from a historical perspective. In her dissertation, she examined the collaborative efforts of physicians and architects in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century France as they strove to reduce high rates of infant and child mortality through modifications to the built environment. It is a project that makes an intervention into the history of early twentieth-century public health policy by demonstrating how architecture became intimately involved in broader social hygiene movements in France. As a Health & Society Scholar, Gina studied the historical relationship between public health initiatives and architectural design in an American context with a focus on the history of maternity care.
Caitlin DeClercq earned a PhD in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley with a previous Master of Science degree in Education. She is working on a forthcoming publication (Routledge, 2022) looking at the social, historical, and built environment contexts of bodily education in American institutions of higher education, an endeavor that integrates her previous experience as a college health educator with her interests in health, education, and architecture. Dr. DeClercq is the co-founder of the Epidemic Urbanism Initiative, a convenor of the IHR, SAHGB, and the Wellcome Collections-sponsored “Spaces of Sickness and Health” seminar, and currently works at Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning in New York City.
For the foreseeable future the SAHGB Seminars will be virtual events via Zoom. We will circulate joining instructions via email the morning of the scheduled event. Please complete the form below to register.
Support the SAHGB
Please consider making a donation to support our virtual programme and educational mission: